All was apples in a bowl

Between the times of knowing

Old slips of paper

Scribbles of somewheres

Sometimes

Soon but never now.

All was watching for the moon

With bowls and cups and spoons

all nestled in their places

Age dusted, cradled, softened for sleep.

All was books and films and pictures

between the times of knowing

A passing glimpse to distant faces.

where all was just the same.

An old familiar game

A softer gentler tune ?

Just apples in a bowl and the changing moon.

This year change has come and shaken her feathers wildly throughout the rooms of my home. She has peeped in through my windowpanes, rattling door handles persistently and raucously, desperate for my attention. She has opened my drawers, rummaging through its contents, picking up items at random. Choosing what to discard with force and what to settle back down in its place, And all the while doing so with a caring and tender sigh.

Her manner has left me, at times, feeling clumsy although eager. As I look for clues, trying to work out, from the flying feathers of her grand clear-out, what she has planned for me and why, I ask myself if I should be participating in this process of change somehow? Should I be helping to direct the form of that change in some way, and if so, how that might I do that ? What does active but peaceful change look like?

For the past several years I have thought, read, dreamt and talked about my call to live authentically. To live alongside my values and to slow down and be the change I want to see around me. Now it feels like that this is the time to begin living those ideas and plans – to emerge from a period of deep reflection and learning, and to explore how those feelings and dreams might look embedded within a daily setting. How they might flow and inform the day to day life of my children and I, and the world we share together. How I might be as a woman who sets an intention to live her thoughts and dreams. To be someone who focuses less on the vision of the future but experiences more the value of the here and now, without feeling the jolt of anxiety that comes from one having perpetually on the road ahead as a way to ward off danger.

Last year I began a writing project with the publishing company Creative Countryside. It was a collaborative project between the Editor Eleanor, and eleven other women writers’, each exploring our own individual responses to a collective brief. A call to response of the relationship between the human and non human world, and what that experience might feel like when captured in language.

It was an amazing experience and one that did not necessarily come easily. It meant going back and going down within myself – exploring those places and what that might have to say about identity and love. It was a love letter but one written tentatively after a broken and only partially healed heart. It was about belonging and absence and the want of connection in all its healing forms.

We wrote the project over the spin of the Celtic Wheel, writing through moon phases and cycles and important dates of the natural year. It was something I gave myself to whole heartedly, feeling more and more sure each time of its importance and meaning. It was a process which revealed itself incrementally. At this point I have to stop and pay my gratitude and awe of Eleanor, our Editor, who showed and demonstrated great grace and wisdom. She continues to inspire me so much. Her trust in the uncertainty of process is one of the great lessons I am learning this year.

During this same period of time I have begun a twelve month long Women’s Shamanic Initiation Course. It is a profound but beautiful exploration of what it means to be ourselves – while being in circle of other glorious women who are doing the same. There is so much beauty in this course – but the work is full and deep. it is something that asks you to heal, to ask questions and to be brave in doing so. It’s the equivalent of as a child dreading the moment before you tear off a plaster – knowing that it might hurt, that it will hurt – not knowing what the wound might look like underneath – but all the while knowing that healing needs light and air in order for it to happen.

Reiki has also entered my life this year and I have begun treating women from the summer house in my garden. I am still in the early processes of learning but the experiences so far have been incredible. They are informing my understanding of so much, not least myself, and I am beginning to explore how these changes and the presence of Reiki within my life, might shape the writing I share, the way I live day to day, and the way I am bringing up my daughters’.

Perhaps the area I am exoeriencing the most change and transformation is my undertsamding of love. The ways in which I give love and the way I experience receiving love in return. Since the birth of my daughters’ six years ago, this has been at the centre and heart of much of what i have been exploring and learning about. My dayghters’ and their future selves the inspiration for it all.

With the Autumn Equinox this year to come I am beginning a creative project with the artist Oliver Jerrold. Having known him when we both young ( he is the unnamed someone I wrote about him in my essay for the book Intrinsic) I have got to know him over the past eighteen months or so as we are now – wiser, kinder,softer,braver, stronger. We are going to be working together to explore our reaponses to the landscape of sacred places, through art and language. It is something I am so excited to begin. He is someone who is full of wonder to me, and whom I care about deeply. I can’t think of anyone I would want to do this kind of work with – and it means I have someone nestled with me as I begin something entirely new.

This is my sea change. 🍃

 

As I write this, Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis have both raged around the corners of our home. We have been lucky to escape the floods but the feeling that something ferocious is happening all around us is deeply visceral and strangely effecting. And yet we are here, safe together. There is a sense of peace despite the weather outside.

Today is Sunday and the week ahead of half term. It is a morning of ritual and routine for us; mostly made up of the small things that can mean so much when there isn’t always a great deal of personal time by yourself. I try and make the most of those moments when they come: a cup of coffee, perhaps a hot bath with some essential oils and a page or two of my book. (I’m reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles)  My girls are downstairs. I think the television is playing and I can definitely hear chatting. Mornings like these have become priceless to me.

 

 

 

When I first began writing this blog post it was just before Christmas and was intended to be read as a precursor to the busy time ahead. I had been doing a lot of thinking about the forthcoming festive season. Not just about Christmas, but rather all the seasonal and cultural markers that all come together during this point of deep Winter. The Solstice, the New Year, then further ahead to Imbolc and the seeing in of the longer days and the eventual coming of Spring.

I wanted to find an intentional way to live through the deep cradle of Winter that is January and February, and find a way for it to have purpose and reason rather than being a time I was just desperate to see the end of. I really wanted to do things differently this Christmas too. I wanted to have a slower more intentional time with my children, and to celebrate the occasion in a way that made it meaningful to us.

 

I am still learning about what the word ‘meaningful’ represents for me and for my girls, and how we can put that into our daily lives in a way that feels natural, authentic and sustainable across our lives as we grow. It may be that we do so in a way that isn’t very obvious to anyone else, other than the three of us; incorporating these principles softly and imperceptibly, but having them as part of our daily lives nonetheless.

But I do know that it is something I am very much committed to. To build our sense of family that lives seasonally, as part of the Earth, rather than against it, and to make the time to embrace those seasons, and the occasions that mark them. And to do so fully and with compassion and intention.

This is in the main because of how important nature is to me but also because I think, in this way, it will guide us toward building a loving, respectful, kind and balanced family. For me making a commitment to take things slowly, and intentionally is a way of honouring all the elements of childhood and family life that I think are important.

 

 

 

With this in mind I was really delighted to be asked to take part in a creative project led by Eleanor Chetham from @creativecountryside. The project was a collaborative piece of work bringing together a collection of different voices that all spoke together on the theme of nature, rewilding and finding a space within those places that was both personal and universal.

The words that people shared were uniting and inclusive. It was like a warm huddle of people coming together to offer a little human warmth through some of the coldest and darkest parts of the seasonal year. And speaking personally, it absolutely worked for me.

I have traditionally been someone who has grimaced her way through the beginning of each New Year, seeing it is as something to endure, rather than something that might actually yield any real substance or even pleasure. But that is exactly what I found.

I discovered a common theme among everyone’s words throughout the project – namely that Winter, and it’s associated adverb wintering could be thought of as a time of reflection and evolve. It could be a period in which the very things I turned away from; the darkness, the cold and the quiet, could become welcome and nurturing opportunities. A time to to rest before Spring and the inevitable unrolling of life that it beings. A time to let go of the need to do things, and just enjoy the silence for awhile. In short Winter had a thing or two to teach me if I let it.

 

With all that in mind and those wonderful ideas in my imagination I have had an opportunity to put some theories and perspectives into real and tangible experiences that have really changed the way I have felt about these past few months.

When I have been outdoors, walking the children to nursery or being out on cold muddy walks with my dog bounding ahead of me and spraying mud everywhere, I have looked for the beauty in the empty landscape around me. I have begun to reevaluate how I look and how I interpret what I see.

 

 

I have enjoyed learning how to see winter in a whole new way; marveling at old dried seed heads, miraculously holding on to brown and weathered stalks, their steadfastness oddly touching knowing the wild weather that has blown all around them. So too, those bare and skeletal trees – suddenly there is an opportunity to study their form; to admire their gnarls and bumps and whirls and to see who they are beneath their cloaks of green. And to love them even the more for it.

 

 

 

At home I have concentrated on making an inviting and cosy place to be in – with fairy lights and blankets – music and warming food. These small things just help propel the sense of time slowed down with some cheer, and a conscious honouring of it.

And there is much to be said for all being huddled together – listening to the wind and the rain do it’s worst against the window panes, and the fire burning brightly creating a safe and wonderful retreat while it does so.

But personally the biggest change is how I address my own personal thoughts and feelings. I have always found the lack of sunlight and warmth on my skin difficult. I can get gloomy, with a tendency to brood and feel low because of it.

Whilst all of those aspects of my character remain – I have worked towards inviting those very parts of my nature to make themselves more at home, rather than trying my hardest to make them go away. I have sat with my thoughts and really tried to listen to what they have to say – discovering in doing so that welcoming my thoughts is a powerful way to feel comfortable about them and ultimately to make sense of them in the long run

I have rested more than I have ever done, resisting the urge to do more in order to make the time pass quicker. I have let chores and plans take longer to action and complete. Winter has a different energy compared to the fire of Spring and Summer and I am learning about who I am and who we are as a family as we move between those different times of the year with grace.

As a final thought I do wonder now how I will approach next winter having experienced this one as I have? I know certainly I will have less dread and fear of those darker days – and I think I will be more confident to welcome and learn from those periods of reflection and introspection that this time of year always brings.

It comes back to the phrase that I often refer to – the ebb and flow of life. And how not to be afraid of it but to understand and welcome it as an essential and wonderful part of being alive.

 

Several years ago I wrote an essay called ‘My Kitchen Table.’ It was an essay about many things; memory, hope, motherhood, love – but it was also about fragility, loss and vulnerability.

When I wrote it, I was thinking about how my kitchen table had played a key part in so many of the moments of my life that defined me.

It had became, in short, a friend.

It seemed to me then, as it still does now, that my kitchen table is arguably the place where I spend my most ordinary, yet intimate and honest moments. It is where I am all the sides of myself; the me who is not good in the mornings, drinking her coffee and blearily making toast for her children. The me that sits late at night, when my children are in bed, quietly wrapping Christmas and birthday presents, and feeling that tender burr of being an only parent. The me that writes pieces like the one I write here (and at my kitchen table too, it seems important to say), the me that likes to cook for other people. The me that has drunk too much wine with old friends’ late into the night, glasses and bottles littering the table-top, putting the world to rights and then promptly regretting it the next day.

The myriad of me’s we all carry inside us.

You could say that the kitchen table is the place where both our public and our private selves are given a seat and made welcome. We share our table with others, but crucially, it is also, at times, the solid physical presence that holds us up and supports us. Our elbows when we lean on our tables, bear our weight and our troubles. With our head in our hands and deep in private thought, it is the humble kitchen table that supports us, in all the ways that expression means.

The poet, Katherine Mansfield, chose a kitchen, and in particular a kitchen-table, as the setting for her magically-ordinary love poem Chamomile Tea. It is impossible not to feel the quiet intensity of the moment in which she describes how;

Under the kitchen table-leg / My knee is pressing against his knee

What I love about this poem is how she captures one quiet moment of intimate intensity, whilst all the while the presence of the ‘peacefully dripping tap’ and the ‘saucepan shadows’ on the walls, create a sense of timelessness and belonging that only adds to the depth of this love-affair, rather than diminishes it.

In Mansfield’s depiction of love as thriving amidst the daily backdrop of pots and pans, she intimates that the kitchen, and the kitchen-table is neither a place of drudgery nor duty but instead, somewhere gloriously heartfelt, and truthful. It is a place of roots and belonging.

 

In thinking about this post I began to ask people what their kitchen table meant to them. And in listening to their answers, I began to hear many stories in which memories became a central theme of each individual story. The table was a physical reminder of people and moments. It was about one’s parents, it was about being a parent. It was family and friendship and home, and what I came to understand was just how emotive that topic was for so many people. Memories endure, and the kitchen-table, made of wood and sturdy, endures alongside those memories as a tangible link to the past,

The photographer Sarah Mason and her partner Suzi, photograph and make films in which kitchen tables have become symbolic in their work capturing people and families in everyday settings. I recently talked to Sarah about her work photographing families. She told me how all her family portrait sessions begin with a cup of tea at the kitchen table of the family she is photographing. This small moment of gathering; allowing an opportunity for everyone to come together in a space in which they are able to feel secure, says much about the table as a place of safe-harbour and belonging. Sarah’s description of the kitchen-table being ‘more of a communal space…than the lounge’ really interested me.

Perhaps it is because when we sit around a table, we are truly looking at one another, listening and sharing each other’s space. The focal point of a table is one another. And ourselves. It is about gathering and sharing and returning. Our tables are somewhere we return to again and again, sometimes with others, sometimes alone, and as such there is a touch of ritual about that which makes it so significant and emotional for us when we recall it.

 

 

 

And now, finally for me, there are other faces around around my kitchen table on a daily basis. Other hands rest upon it, and smaller feet than mine swing beneath it. No longer a table for one. I have become a mother and this has become our family table. And my kitchen-table, silently bearing witness to all those future memories yet to come, and simultaneously representing all those stories and memories that have gone before, will be at the heart of them all.

Just as it should. My kitchen-table, thank you.

– 

 

 

A few years ago ago I lived in a small town in the South West of England. It was a place I lived for some time although I never came to think of as home. It was a place of in between’s.

And that was exactly how I felt too.

In the evenings I would take my dog for a walk. It was always early evening and a time of people coming home from work. It was a time of  homes filling with light and warmth – meals being prepared and eaten, televisions flickering in the corners of lamp-lit rooms, and an over arching feeling of people coming together; of families returning to their source.

There was one house which always caught my eye. A tall Victorian terrace house, whose kitchen was on the basement level. Looking through the window into that kitchen you could see a wooden table, with chairs seated all around it. A soft lit lamp cast yellow-gold shadows over a wine bottle, a teapot, the pictures on the wall and a fireplace at the far end of the room.

 

 

 

 

It spoke of home to me in so many ways, and articulated a need in me for a sense of belonging, which that room represented so pertinently.

 

I saw security, routine, ritual – the everyday minutiae and magnitude of life all beautifully captured in that one ordinary domestic scene.

 

When I became a mother, that idea of home, and what home meant occupied my thoughts a great deal. It meant looking back towards my own childhood, remembering what mattered to me then, in terms of what there was, but also, and perhaps harder and more complex to define; what was missing from it too.

 

In becoming a family I have thought about what being a family means to me – and what I want it to mean for my children. And in doing so the words I keep returning to, like a mantra are ritual and routine.

 

 

 

 

It wasn’t so long ago that I was a someone who was all about the ritual and rarely the routine. The former seeming so more dramatic, important, cooler.

 

Routine by comparison seemed so dull, and in truth I was fearful of it; it seemed to speak of entrenched habit but without feeling, of being trapped and in many ways being lonely and unhappy.

 

But as time went by and my inner wisdom grew a little wiser, and I became alongside that a little more reflective of my own naive follies – my thoughts around those two words began to change.

 

I began to yearn for the sanctuary of routine – suggesting to me then, as it rightly does anyway – belonging, safety and commitment. To know that whilst the world moves around you, changeable, unpredictable and progressive – those small cyclical aspects of your life that you return to again and again, can be the very things that keep you grounded, anchored and centered. In short, the very things that keep you safe.

 

 

 

 

And, in turn, that understanding and acceptance of the word, it’s reappraisal  – showed me that without routine – ritual alone is a shallow and essentially meaningless pursuit. The two words need each other to make meaning.

 

Purpose being given meaning, and meaning given purpose.

 

 

With the time of Samhain around us, and the longer, darker nights here for the winter ahead, it seems to be the best time to be thinking about these thoughts and feelings around the ideas of home and family.

 

Having spent this rare, long wonderful summer beneath the open skies as much as possible, it is now the time to go small, to return to our home, lighting fires, bringing in wood, wellies by the back door and scarves on the hooks. Knowing that we will spend more time together here at home, it seems right to learn, gather and find what rituals and routines are important to us as a family, and to embroider these little personal ways within the patchwork of our winter days.

 

So that our days, however beautifully ordinary and imperfect, can have a meaning of us as a family, in all the ways we are.

 

 

 

We are surrounded by stories, and stories are everywhere.

We are each made up of layers upon layers of stories, and it is precisely these stories, wrapping themselves around us like a magic cloak, that work to inform and shape our identities; telling others who we are, and perhaps most importantly, telling ourselves, of who we are.

I have always loved stories. As a child I would reach out an ear, ready for the stories I would hear the grown-ups tell.

My maternal Grandmother was French and I loved hearing the stories of a different country that felt like home. The romance of a different and beautiful language, and all those second-hand tales of Convent schools, rosary beads and difficult nuns clicking down the corridors, fierce looks on their faces.

My. Grandmother Jacqueline Delance – she has written ‘To my Eric’ on the photograph. Eric was her husband. My Grandpa…

There is a story that my Great-Grandpa may have helped the Resistance during the war. He was buried with emblem of the  Croix-De-Lorraine on his coffin. We were told later, that this was a known symbol for those who supported, or were members of Free French. A kind of shared secret code for those who assisted, or took part in Resistance work.

If my Great-Grandpa did so, he never spoke of them. Some stories, are not for the telling. They are to imagined and revered, and to be wondered at. They are certain stories that remain elusive and full of mystery.

My English Grandpa made wonderful home-movies (which we discovered years after he had passed away, in my Uncle’s attic) These wonderful cine films, brought to life my Great-grandparents, French markets and my Mum when she was a little girl.

My Dad, meanwhile, came from generations of farmers. And these stories were more earthy, more rooted in land and hard work.

My Great Grandfatber, Harry, and my Grandad, Wilf. Taken in a field with a champion crop of flax in 1940.

My Grandparents had an Italian Prisoner of war who worked on their farm. He took my Dad out into the fields with him, keeping him safe by strapping him to the helm of a horse-cart, while he worked.

I look at my Dad, and these stories feel so important. They explain to me who he was as a boy. And they explain the father he is to me now.

These stories I took as my own; absorbing their adventures, and turning them into pocket-fables. These worlds of charm, heartbreak and love, that I could turn into life-lessons and learn from.

Later, as I grew older and looked beyond my family for stories, I learnt in the same way I had at my Mothers knee, to listen out for stories in public places – on buses, trains, queues at post offices and across tables in busy cafe’s.

Stories strangers shared with you on late night train rides, or waiting for taxis in heavy snow. This was before mobile phones, when talk was all around, when a good gossip happened over a counter, rather than on a Facebook timeline.

But that isn’t to say that Social Media doesn’t promote or encourage storytelling. In fact Instagram, for instance, puts storytelling at the heart of what it does best; bringing people together by the stories and images that are shared.

On Instagram, you can find such beautiful examples of storytelling, and for me, the best kind. Small insights into little moments, which in themselves speak of larger narrative arcs hidden behind them.

People who are brave enough to share a story, and to contribute towards building a lexicon of daily life; from the momentous to the minutiae, with a picture that draws you in, and an accompanying thread of a story written beautifully beneath it.

Creating a little world laid out in words and images, inviting you to imagine the rest.

The difficulty is to slow down long enough to take them in. To resist the urge to move on to the next story and the next, but instead to stop and pause, to take some moments to really listen. We should all be doing more of that. After all,  a good story will always need an even better listener for it to really come to life.

There is, of course, the argument that Instagram can be seen as idealistic or contrived, by offering up the best narrative versions of ourselves and the lives we lead.

But isn’t it also true that the art of a good storyteller is to do precisely that? To present a story with a little spin and polish. To take an event, a memory, a glance, and by breathing the storytellers magic upon it; illuminating it into something meaningful ~ something memorable. Something magical.

A passing moment, which becomes an open door to a tale,  no matter how ordinary its setting.

So my stories here – the stories I write, the snippets of my days I collect in notebooks – the photographs I keep, and the pictures I take – are all the stories I want to hand on to my children.

And as we move along through our days, our seasons, our years, more stories will pass through.

Telling stories that tell us of who we are…. 🍃🍃🍃🍃